In a workplace adapting to a changing world, I feel myself becoming more obsolete with each new hire, each rising star arriving with the promise of enlivening our staid old operation with a youthful approach.
A cyclical panic overtakes me each time we’re heading for a shake-up, and it rules the mood for a few weeks until the arrival of the inevitable failure to deliver that’s more common than not. While meanwhile I hunt around for ways to up my game. Not that I wish anyone to fail. Bring on those new ideas that will turn us around and place us in the best possible position for the near future. Help us see where we can do better.
If I kid myself into thinking my little newsletter articles are rocking anybody’s world, the data-tracking tools will show me otherwise. Message sent to more than 2,000 subscribers but only 28 clicked the link to read the story. And then how many abandoned after the first few words? Thankfully I cannot know. The stories are the ones where I “really get to write,” as opposed to the ones where I keep pushing around that same little blurb, rearranging the same 25 words in any combination that might state the same damned thing some new, more interesting way. And all in hopes that someone might “click.” It’s “writing,” sure, but is it, really?
My heart would tell me no, but my practical side, which is the side I’ve been forced to hone these past forty years on my own, would tell me to feel fortunate to have a job where I work with words, whatever the capacity. My lifelong dream came true, only instead of spending my days at my desk writing novels and stories and essays, I spend my days rearranging blurbs and writing newsletter articles nobody’s clicking to read. But I still have the desk, the window, the raw stuff of language before me.
I can recite the facts and spit out the blurbs, but can I weave them into a story? And what’s the larger lesson? As they say in my world of work: What’s the take-away?
Portrait of a woman, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, 1787. Public domain.